The business now in hand is the cantata,
which is coming together after many exasperating and tedious rehearsals. I am
almost 10 years old and I would like to sing a solo, but I’m not going to.
There was early mention of me doing so, but the organist’s brother’s wife’s
sister’s niece arrives from the back of nowhere in the USA,, so I’m on the back
burner and quickly grasping that it’s not what, but who you know that really
matters, an experience that is to be repeated many times over in different
guises.
Picture it. I am five years old. They
are holding a concert in the chapel. I am dressed in a long organza frock and
matching lilac apron, with a Biedermeier straw bonnet perched on my head and
tied under my chin with satin ribbons. I am carrying a small wicker basket with
flowers in it. I look like the porcelain figure on Mama’s mantlepiece. I am
about to sing a duet with my infant school sweetheart, George, who is no longer
my sweetheart, but has a nice voice. The song is called "Oh no John, no
John, no John, no!" and I am the lady and George is John. Standing on a
stage just singing anything to anyone is my idea of heaven, so I’m happy to
sing about John with George, though he is not as stage-struck or as ambitious
as I already am.
The chapel is full and George, now assured
of my esteem after offering me half his bar of chocolate, unfortunately looks
as if he is about to fill his velvet Biedermeier bloomers with something unmentionable. Lucky
for him, someone else notices it, too, and he is ushered to the bathroom with
seconds to spare.
George is certainly not an artist’s dream stage partner,
being reluctant to make an exhibition of himself, which is a reservation that
never crosses my mind. You can’t accuse him of having a
professional attitude and this is going to be the very last time he will let
himself in for something so painful. I know that, because he tells me.
This is the start of my illustrious
career, I am sure.
George’s voice is husky on the day. He
gets the words mixed up and his gestures are amateur, but I have practised it
all in front of the mirror. My voice is anything but the voice of a five year
old. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s like magic. I open my mouth and out
come these pretty sounds. At least, I’m told they are pretty. I stand on one
side of the pulpit and George stands on the other. We are accompanied on the
piano by Miss Thomas because the regular church pianist cum organist is going
to conduct the orchestra, which consists of the organ, Miss Crow on descant
recorder, and Mr Fortune on the fiddle, so he is resting up in the vestry and
drinking something that looks like egg from a flask he has brought from home.
Miss Thomas very often sleeps through the sermon when it’s her turn to do the
Sunday service, because from Monday to Saturday she has to work long hours
behind the counter at the post-office and push her ancient mother around town
the rest of the time. But it’s unlikely that she will nod off today with all
that racket going on when the orchestra plays its divertimenti, which Mama
later says weren’t a bit diverting, but certainly mental.
Mama likes playing with words.
Our vocal rendering of Oh No John No
John No is greeted with ecstatic approval. The applause goes on so long
that I have already removed apron and bonnet to get back into my ordinary
clothes ready for the next item.
"Encore" the people insist,
and someone tries to unravel the knot in my apron that I made getting it off in
a hurry and tie my bonnet back on again. I try to look calm and collected
though my cheeks are burning with excitement and I’m going to have to do the
whole song by myself because scaredy-pants George has refused point blank to
repeat his ordeal and has run off and hidden to be quite sure that no one
coerces him.
George is consigned to my bad memory chest.
A few weeks later Uncle Frank rewards
us all with a huge knees-up in a nearby chapel hall. He says my singing is the
nicest thing that has happened to him since dear Auntie Sylvia died, and I
agree, especially as I’ve never before seen so much food all at once.
The cantata being hashed up this time,
five years or so after the George episode, is called ‘God’s Little Children’ and
will consist of me keeping things going in the back row, while the organist’s
brother’s wife’s sister’s niece, who has only a modest singing voice, wiggles
her chin like a budgerigar when she sings, and has next to no musicality
despite the accolades that have proceeded her arrival, is up in the pulpit
singing all the nice bits I should have been singing.
It will be of no
satisfaction at all to have people asking me why I haven’t sung on my own. I
want to sing, not make excuses for not doing so. My whole being cries out to be
heard. I will be heard, that’s for sure, in much greater places than
this. The prophet is not acknowledged in his own country, Dada says.
God might have a hand in blessing the
general idea of performing a cantata, but even God can’t hear my pleas in terms
of pushing my rival down the vicarage stairs to eliminate her, so he won’t hear
my singing this time round, unless he thinks of something quickly of his own
accord. In fact, I think this is the first time that I have started to doubt
the very existence of God.
Perhaps he doesn’t even want me to
sing. What sort of a god is that?
Perhaps I should be praying, like the
preacher said in last Sunday’s sermon. Praying for divine guidance to help me
suffocate my pagan urges, which include scraping the bowl out after Mama’s made
a cake, squeezing raw sausage meat out of the skin and eating it before it can
get to the frying-pan, and munching pieces of raw potato even though they are
bad for you, not to mention reading in bed when you should be asleep hours ago.
But singing isn’t pagan. Everyone
says else it’s a gift from God. So why doesn’t God want to hear it? Surely he’d
like to check up on progress. And with a little bit of elbow he could get me
back into the limelight, where I am sure I belong.
As I intimated just now, religion
isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Of course, I don’t know if the
preacher’s sermon was really aimed at me. The church with the barbed-wire fence
is in the news again, and the holier-than-thou pressed material congregation is
up in arms, despite it being the ‘enemy’ on the other side of the street.
A choir boy has spilt some beans.
Despite my nine going on ten years I can’t hazard a guess as to why the
Catholics have beans in their church. I ask Mama, but she tells me it’s just a
turn of phrase and I am to mind my own business and stop speculating about
things I do not understand, and never will, if she has her say.
But I am curious, so I go to the
library and read the local weekly advertiser, our copy of which was for some
unfathomable reason put on the fire almost the minute it arrived.
The library is a
good place for finding out things you are not supposed to know. There I can
read all about them in peace if I hide whatever it is I wish to peruse between
two large children’s atlases and transport it to behind the section on sports
and hobbies at the far end of the building.
Mama is right. Beans
don’t come into it. A choirboy has brought disgrace on the community, except
that the disgrace seems to be his attempt to escape from the clutches of this ‘man
of God’ rather than the violation perpetrated on him. To add insult to injury,
the barbed-wire priest has left with the silver candle-sticks for an unknown
destination. The church is infinitely more anxious about the whereabouts
of the candle-sticks than the souls of its parishioners, I notice.
This report makes such a deep
impression on me that I instantly memorize it. Then I borrow a book on birds in
your garden and carry it home as an alibi, in case someone has seen me in the
vicinity of the library. You can’t be too careful.
Now the barbed-wire church is locked
day and night while they try to get a replacement priest and avoid having the
remaining treasure stolen. No one is allowed in, the choirboys no longer play
football on the ancient graveyard and the service they call Mass is being held
at the Catholic school. Since I am not officially allowed to talk to
Catholics – and anyway most of them are too ashamed of the goings-on under
their noses to leave the house during daylight - I frequently resort to my
book-borrowing tactics, but persistent as I am, I can’t find out any more about
what is going on than I clandestinely read in the well-thumbed newspapers.
One side-effect of my preoccupation with the morals of the
cloth is that Mama thinks I am at last forgetting the singing nonsense and
doing something educational for my future, but to her ultimate annoyance
whatever occupies me transiently never ever quenches my theatrical ambitions.
Need I say that the trials and
tribulations of getting the cantata up and running in our little chapel are,
despite the frequent bitching and holier-than-thou attitude of the believers on
our side of the Christian fence, small fry in comparison with the juicy and
scandalous events on the other side. There isn’t an angel in sight and the
barbed-wire priest must surely have taken his guardian angel with him, which
makes you wonder how discerning angels actually are.
I think our preacher
should be praying for his colleague the priest. After all, they both work for
the same boss. And the American relative of the vicar who messed up my musical ambitions, is not the only well-connected person to do so, but that's another story.
I’ll never understand grownups.
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